"Waiting and Remembering" NOTES
by
Jo-Anne Green
Artists' Book, Mixed Media on Paper
20 Pages, 20" X 15"
1986-1987
"Waiting and Remembering" is at the Jack Ginsberg Centre for Book Arts
at Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg, South Africa
| "Waiting" (pages 1-9) |
| This book was begun as an exploration of ideas for a large-scale, multimedia performance. The chair, drawn from a photograph by South African photographer David Goldblatt, was envisioned as the central prop: it was to be large enough for people to move around beneath it, and the back was to serve as a projection screen. The colors and textures were to be recreated with lighting, and while the chair was to remain on the stage for the duration of the performance, the change in color and the intensity of light was to signify a new scene. Thematically, I was continuing my On the Mines series, which had developed out of the last five or six pages of Book Two. I had photographed various mining apparatuses on abandoned gold mines around Johannesburg, and the anthropomorphized torsos/heads had served as a metaphor for the miners themselves. A State of Emergency was declared in South Africa in 1985. I was working on a table in my Brookline apartment, listening to news reports on public radio. South Africa was in the spotlight, and hourly events streamed into my home as they unfolded — children shot in the streets of Soweto, tanks rumbling down highways, protestors taking to the streets of Johannesburg en masse for the first time. These daily occurrences are recorded in the book. 1. The "Trojan Horse" event: a truck hiding soldiers casually drives down a township street, a child throws a stone and the soldiers respond with machine gun fire. 2. a mother's anguish after the hanging of her son, a nineteen year old poet who had been charged with the murder of a policeman and not given a fair trial, and the authorities' refusal to let her say good-bye to him. I introduced photographs from newspapers and magazines as "factual evidence" because in conversations with my family in South Africa, the "facts" were refuted as propaganda. Everything I said about these events was contested. It was as if we were being told completely different stories. To some degree, this was true. Television was controlled by the South African government, and all opposition was censored. Waiting ends with a scene about migrant labor: women left destitute in the rural homelands, their fathers, husbands and sons working on the mines in Johannesburg. |
| Remembering [pages 10-19] |
| Remembering is the miners' story. It, too, begins with a photograph (photographer "Unknown"), entitled "SASPU, Compounds, Shaft 5, Crown Mines." The figure in the photograph appears on every page, just as the chair does in Waiting. Here I explore the physical, psychological, economic, and social hardships inflicted on gold miners and their families in Apartheid South Africa. The "passageway" cut out through the upper right hand corner of all of the pages represents a walk (time) down the actual passageway (space) of the home I grew up in. It appeared in a recurring nightmare I had as young child. Page one of Remembering begins with a shower scene; my nightmare ends with a shower scene. I was intent on merging the personal and political spaces which I formerly saw as binary, but no longer believed. Remembering is developed further in my following series, "Well, as a result of pain..." |
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